We've reached into the recesses of Prospero's twisted past to bring you these four short stories, and endeavored to stay about as spoiler-free as the back cover with regard to the present day storyline, so whether you've already read Splinters or not, tune in every Sunday night in October for a fresh tale of the dark and clandestine history of everyone's favorite Splinter-infested small town!

For our fourth and final tale, we'll catch up with Mina Todd, not quite as we know her...

The Prospero Chronicles:TagalongsBy F.J.R. TitchenellMina - Five years before the events of Splinters

It was Tuesday. I had a lead on an abduction taking place in the next forty-eight hours. I also had thirteen hours of stacked up surveillance audio to listen to, a borrowed illegal rifle hidden under my bed to figure out how to take apart and put back together, and an essay on the discovery of America to plagiarize from an outdated textbook.And, because it was Tuesday, I had a Girl Scout meeting.I threw the unnaturally green vest over my stripy purple sweater, arranged the matching beret to stay put over my ponytail, and descended the stairs to the community center basement with none of my usual debate.This wasn’t a week I could ditch and get away with it.Thankfully, about half the girls were already there, enough and not too many to make it possible to choose the seat that would best work the odds.I sat down at one of the tables, next to Madison Holland, across from Haley Perkins, and diagonal from Brianna Hicks, without waiting for glances of acknowledgement or welcome. Haley gave me one anyway.I’d often wondered what it would take to avoid a kind smile from Haley Perkins.I started tracing the cracks in the table with my fingers, trying to follow all the activity in the room with my ears, to keep my brain full enough to function. In my central mental workspace, I mapped out the most likely parts of town, calculating distances and travel time. That auditory activity level was limited. Whatever conversation there had been before I arrived came to a dead halt. A year ago, this would have been a minor inconvenience. Troop meetings had been one of my safest places, left mostly alone yet surrounded by younger, human girls.Now, though, troop 246 was celebrating one eleventh birthday after another, pimples, bra outlines and menstrual symptoms cropping up left and right. Any one of us might be developed enough now to be replaced by Splinters. Any one of the others could be one, and it was becoming more difficult not to worry about the contents of the conversations that always abruptly died off around me.“I like your sweater,” Haley tried to resurrect this one.“Thanks,” I answered, winding a loose thread from its sleeve between my fingers for mental packing material. It should have ended there.“Don’t you like it?” Haley asked the rest of the table.“It’s nice,” Brianna agreed as she did with almost everything Haley said.“Little warm, though, isn’t it?” Madison put in. “It’s practically summer.”“It’s April,” I said, tying a slipknot and untying it. Haley and Brianna were in sweatshirts, with floral umbrellas handy for the Northern California spring showers. Madison was determinedly not shivering in a tank top and tiny pleated skirt.“We don’t all look as good in blue as you do, do we?” Haley teased her back affectionately, nudging me under the table to join her.“You look like a pedophile dressed you this morning,” I told Madison.Haley dropped her forehead exasperatedly to her hand, Madison scooted away, giving me more room, Brianna stared down at her clasped hands, and I silently called the aimless small talk’s time of death.Finally, Michelle, Brianna’s mother and our troop leader, felt her way into the room with her toes, vision blocked by the crates stacked higher than her head in her arms, followed by a few other similarly encumbered parents, including both of Haley’s and neither of mine.They could afford my time to come here for “much needed extra socialization” and to give our family some illusion of normality. Never their own. Not that I minded the space from them.Haley’s Dad came out of the haze that followed him everywhere except near her, for long enough to wrap her in a tight hug that she only half pretended to be embarrassed by, before all the parental hangers-on left with their expected offers of further help to Michelle.Michelle brushed them off in the expected way, turned to us, opened one of the crates, and pulled out the top box of Thin Mints with a flourish.Haley and Brianna led the round of applause.My absence would most definitely have been noted today. Money was involved.“We’ve got more than enough here,” she told us, “So don’t worry about dropping off your preorders first unless you start running low. If that happens, just come back here to check inventory and stock up. We’ll go in pairs and one group of three. Remember, keep your buddy in sight at all times.”A few of the girls raised three fingers in promise. I joined the wave of imitation before I could get stuck being last.“Okay, Christine and Sarah, you start with Kirby Street, Hannah and Lisa, McMurdo Avenue, Brianna and Madison…”I don’t know whose grip went more rigid against the table, Brianna’s or mine, when her name, for the first time, was not followed by Haley’s.“Start at the bottom of Miracle Trail and head down West Street”Whose parents had meddled, I didn’t know. My mother was probable, or possibly Michelle herself had decided to start weaning Brianna off of Haley’s company before their big move back east at the end of the year.The answer didn’t change the consequences of my seating miscalculation.“Haley and Mina…” Haley took the separation from both her usual companions considerably better, giving them both small shrugs of apology and me another small smile. “Kramer Road.”I got up while the rest of the names were being called and started loading cookies into the mismatched carrier assigned to the two of us, a canvas box on wheels intended for laundry, and scooped a couple extra boxes of Tagalongs into my arms. That way I appeared to be helping when I bolted out of the room the moment we were bid good luck, Haley maneuvering the laundry basket up the stairs behind me.I started across the community center lawn toward Kramer Road, in case Michelle was watching behind us, planning to circle back toward Main Street as soon as I was out of sight.I checked the few small improvised flamethrowers I’d been able to conceal in the butterfly-embroidered pockets of my jeans and slipped my Bluetooth on under my beret.“Aldo?” I tested it.“You’re just in time,” my techie, my eye in the sky, and my closest ally in Prospero answered me in his hushed, sharp, nine-year-old voice, probably from under his bed. “Alexei’s just left the school, headed east.”Alexei Smith, glitchiest and most obvious of Splinters to those of us who knew what to look for, was simply the quaintly odd neighborhood drama teacher to those who didn’t, and one of the Splinter Council’s favorite agents for new abductions. It was usually easier to keep track of him than of all the possible targets.“I think you can intercept him at-”“There’s a wrinkle,” I stopped Aldo’s calculations as Haley’s lanky stride and the squeak of the laundry basket caught up behind me.“I think we should start with the west side of the street, then do the east on the way back,” Haley suggested casually, as though her keeping up had never been in question.It would have taken me two words at most to make Madison angry enough to take off and think she was the one ditching me, especially with the head start I had going today. Haley, on the other hand...“It might be quicker if we each took one side,” I imitated her agreeable tone.She narrowed her eyes in a way that managed to be accusing without meanness. “We’re supposed to stick together,” she reminded me.So much for getting agreeably separated. I turned down the first corner toward the center of town.“Mina!” Haley shouted, squeaking along after me. “Kramer Road is the other way!”“Yes, it is,” I answered.“Where are you going?”“This way,” I said.“Mina, please, don’t make me go back there and tell Michelle I lost you.”I turned back to try to decide if she meant it.“Please.” There was none of the upsweeping tension to the corners of her mouth or eyes that would suggest she was enjoying or even aware of the threat this would be, sending adults looking for me right now. “The rules are there to keep us safe.”Oh, she meant it. She thought she was protecting me.Before I could laugh at the absurdity of this, Aldo broke our impasse.“Kramer Road is fine if you’re heading south. He’s veering around. I’ll let you know if he makes a move, just don’t take too long.”“Okay, fine.” I took a step back toward our assigned territory.“Really?” asked Haley. “Really,” I had to push Haley on ahead of me. She kept looking over her shoulder to make sure I was still there, suspicion slowly transitioning into hope.Kramer Road paralleled West Street, the second road from the thick tree line and rises of rock that marked the sudden edge of Prospero. Haley gave up on trying to watch both me and where she was going as we neared the first house, grabbing my wrist instead and pulling me alongside her onto its creaky wooden porch.She knocked on the door, and I braced myself for the stilted exchange of words that would follow.I’d never been very good at saying the right thing. The best I could do was maybe an eighty percent imitation of people like Haley. The Old Man, the Splinter hunter who had taught me everything I knew about our fight, had also taught me to be even more creative and effective at saying the wrong thing when saying the wrong thing could be useful, but at saying the right thing, he was no help at all.I could scrape by in school and troop meetings and other places where words had purposes, where there were goals, however trivial, to accomplish, but these sorts of neighborly interactions with acquaintances of uncertain humanity, full of obligatory inquiries about people’s families’ health, were another story.Mr. Callahan opened the door with a warm greeting for Haley and a polite recognition of me. I stood painfully still while the two of them mused upon the fact that it was indeed that cookie-selling time of the year again, and Aldo detailed into my ear the way Alexei Smith was leading Mr. Meiers, one of the other teachers from the high school, away from the activity of Main Street and into the park.This sounded like how it would go. Teachers were some of the Splinters’ favorite people to take. Alexei would take Mr. Meiers to somewhere no one else would see him transform. Then he would take Splinter form to overpower him and drag him out to the woods, to wherever in that maze of trees and canyons the replacements were performed, and tomorrow Mr. Meiers would be gone and there would be a Splinter teaching his classes and wearing his clothes and living his life.Unless I could get there in time.After the first few houses, I managed to talk Haley into doing two houses at once, so long as I stayed on the same side of the street with her, where we could see each other.Far fewer people had an appetite for Girl Scout cookies when it was only me on their porches asking them and no Haley, so the number of doors this strategy closed on us sped things along considerably as well, but fifteen minutes and two and a half blocks later, Aldo’s confidence was audibly slipping.“Can you hurry it up any? You might want to hear this.”Aldo held his mouthpiece to one of the open surveillance streams he was monitoring for me, to give me a staticky preview.“It is soooo much nicer to rehearse in this time of year!” Alexei’s voice could send shudders up my spine even at this distance, those extended, distorted vowels that belonged in no earthly accent, however thick. I’d quite thoroughly checked. “...Your daughter, she is veeeery good actress! You must see her twirl the Desdemona dress. It drags only slightly!”“Yes... she’s certainly sprouted the last couple years,” Meiers tried pitiably to respond to this. “It is only her rhyming cooooouplets that conceeeern me...“He’s leading him behind the amphitheater,” Aldo mercifully cut off the direct audio. Behind the amphitheater. Out of sight. From there it was a straight shot to the woods by way of... of...My mental map was blurry, and in the absence of my keyboard or my Sudoku book to reset my brain, I ripped open what turned out to be the wrong end of one of the Tagalongs boxes in my arms and took two cookies in as many bites.“You’re not supposed to eat them!” Haley scolded.I took four dollars of loose lunch money out of my jeans pocket, handed it to her for the change envelope, and offered her the open bottom of the box.Haley crossed her arms and nearly managed to keep from licking her lips. “That’s still not what they’re for.”I shrugged and took a third, mentally testing the sharpness of my geographic awareness of Prospero as my rising blood sugar brought the world back into focus.“Do you always have to be so difficult?” she sighed.“I’m difficult?” I realized too late how little could be gained from engaging.“Yes, you are!” said Haley. “Yeah, some of the stuff we’re supposed to do is dumb. I know. But some of it isn’t. And some of it is fun. That is one of the reasons we’re here, you know. And you have more fun if you go with it, but you’re always fighting or ignoring or avoiding everything.”I shrugged again. It didn’t placate her.“Do you have somewhere more important to be?”I didn’t shrug again, didn’t say anything. She didn’t need me to.“You’re in a pretty big hurry. Is something happening down the hill?”What Haley might imagine was happening in town, I didn’t know. A new book or videogame I wanted to pick up, probably. Whatever it was had to be harmless and far enough from the truth to acknowledge.I shrugged again, in the slow, exaggerated way that denotes reluctant confirmation.“Well,” said Haley, “you do have us ahead of schedule. Maybe we can make a quick stop before doing the east side.”I let the hope show on my face. That wasn’t ideal, but maybe it would be enough to buy Mr. Meiers some time.The Old Man didn’t allow me kill Splinters inside town limits anyway. Too messy. Too many complications. Splinters, like humans, disappeared most easily out in the woods. And Alexei had always managed to evade us out there, so here in Prospero he remained, making moves against one human after another, for me to thwart one by one, when I was lucky.But Splinters liked to keep things neat and private too. All I often had to do to at least delay an abduction was to make sure a person couldn’t be dragged at the Splinters’ convenience out to the woods without being seen by humans like me.Haley and I could interrupt their meeting together, find some reason Mr. Meiers had to go spend the rest of the day somewhere densely populated, we’d go back to selling cookies to her heart’s content, and then I’d check up on him later.“Really?” I asked her.“Really,” she said. “But first, you take one more house,” she nodded at the next one, “and smile. Maybe you’ll get a sale. Maybe it’ll be fun.”“One house, I’ll smile and do the talking, and then we make a stop across Main Street?” I summed up. “One house is pushing it,” Aldo advised.I was the one hurrying Haley up the steps this time.“Better hope they’re on a diet,” said Aldo.I’d do more than hope.Haley rang the doorbell and shoved me in front of her just as the door opened.“Hi, Mrs. Becker,” I pushed through instinct to be silent with a broadly forced grin. “Would you like to buy some four dollar boxes of repackaged two dollar Keebler cookies to bring our Girl Scout troop fifty cents closer to sleeping in tents at the Lowell ranch, where Mr. Lowell would probably let us sleep for free if it didn’t build character to invent an activity in Prospero worth holding a fundraiser for?”Haley kicked me in the back of the ankle and covered her face in her hands. Not enough of it to keep me from seeing the involuntary grin in the muscles of her cheeks.“I’d love to!” Mrs. Becker exclaimed. Whether she’d heard a word of my speed-spiel was anyone’s guess. Her eyes hadn’t left the vein of Samoa boxes Haley had shuffled to the top of the laundry carrier. “I’ll take two of those and one of Thin Mints. Let me see…” She hunted around the end table by her door for several seconds for a purse, which she then hunted around for several more seconds for a wallet, which she opened to find a single five dollar bill. “Just let me find my checkbook,” she said, glancing up at the other box of Tagalongs in my arms. “Oh, and one of those!”“Great choice,” I said. “They last three years at room temperature, see?”I ate another Tagalong out of the open box, the age of which I knew nothing about.This did not deter her from a further four-and-a-half minute quest for the elusive checkbook.Once we were finally off of Mrs. Becker’s porch, check in hand, the door latching behind us, Haley poked me hard in the ribs, a gale of giggles bursting out. My body tensed automatically against the attack, and in lieu of putting her in a reflexive chokehold, I sidestepped quickly and as politely as I could out of her reach.“That was awful,” Haley gasped, clearly trying to calm her diaphragm and bring some seriousness to her face.“And ineffective,” I said, but out of range of her tickling, running just ahead of her toward Main Street, I found I was struggling to do the same.Not for long.“We were wrong,” Aldo hissed suddenly in my ear. “Mr. Meiers is going home. Alexei’s meeting up with Hermes at the Tea House. They could be there for hours. I don’t think he’s handling the abduction!”I stopped with a skid of my sneakers. Hermes was another Effectively Certain Splinters. He couldn’t be a target.“Then who?” I prompted him.“Who what?” Haley asked, catching her breath.“I don’t know,” said Aldo, “but something just tripped one of our sensors on the tree line, just below Miracle Trail!”Back where we started. Madison and Brianna. They were wandering alone right next to the forest, and there was every chance one of them might already be a Splinter.“On my way,” I muttered.“Who are you talking to?” asked Haley somewhere behind me, before she realized that I was running back up the hill and started running after me. “Hey, wait! What happened to Main Street?”I didn’t answer her until her inconveniently long legs pulled even with mine, and she reached a hand out for my arm.“Go away!” I snapped, letting myself jerk away from her as hard as I could, scattering the remaining cookies from the mangled box in my hand. I didn’t need to bring a second potential abductee along with me when I got in the monster’s way right at the edge of the woods.Haley’s infectious laughter faded further away than if it had never been there at all, and I couldn’t for the life of me explain why I’d been wasting precious seconds playing Girl Scout and negotiating and smiling and trying to make her laugh, instead of getting as far away from her as I could.“Tell me where you’re going, and we’ll go,” she offered. “We’ll go together, and we’ll be safe.”“This is Prospero!” I shouted. “Do you know why they let us wander around with a basketful of cookies, an envelope of cash, and the buddy system? Do you realize why we’re not selling cookies off the front step of a supermarket, next to three parents and a security guard? Because we live in a nowhere so safe that there aren’t even any strangers to talk to! Nothing is going to happen to us because we don’t hold hands crossing the street!”But it wasn’t safe, and things were going to happen to us, worse things than would happen in Chicago and New York and LA, things that a security guard for every scout couldn’t stop, and they could be happening to the other girls right now.When Haley didn’t concede the point, I took the handle of the laundry basket out of her hands. “If you’re going to tell, tell.” I let the handle go, so the basket of cookies started to roll down the slanted street.Haley grabbed for it, and I ran, up the nearest driveway on the left, through the close-set bushes at the back of someone’s yard, over a chain link fence, and out onto West Street.There was no sign of Brianna and Madison for the first three blocks I ran uphill, north toward to the Miracle trailhead. Finally, I heard the snap of movement in the trees.Quietly as I could, I climbed the shelf of rock at the edge of the road into the redwoods and circled around to the back of the movement. From the shadows of a cluster of trunks, I watched the shapes of two girls, one leading the other. One glanced close to my hiding place, and I pulled back, wanting to crush my vest and sweater and sparkly embroidered jeans into the red bark behind me.Someday, I decided, when I was old enough to shop for myself, I was never going to wear colors again.Brianna, leading Madison, my eyes adjusted enough to discern.I slipped my lighter into my hand, and the first moment Madison turned her head back toward the road, I grabbed Brianna by the back of her collar and yanked her behind the trees with me.“Brianna?” Madison called out, taking several hurried steps in the wrong direction, turning around and squinting into the shade.The surprise had made Brianna let go of her hand.With two wooden cracks, Brianna’s elbows inverted, her now backwards hands latching instead onto my left sleeve and right wrist. The top half of her head twisted around to look at me with a splintering creak, distorted, claylike remnants of her nose following along with it.“You,” she said through a mouth forming out of what had been the side of her neck, “really need to leave us alone.”I wasn’t allowed to kill it, not here, not on my own. I could hurt it, though, temporarily but badly. I flicked on the lighter in my hand, burning into the malformed limb that held my wrist. It bubbled and smoked and finally had to withdraw with an insectoid shriek of escaping air.“Brianna?” Madison called again.A new limb burst from Brianna’s shoulder, cutting through her sweatshirt, featureless and tentacle-like, striking across my face, knocking my head back into the trunk behind me, snapping the loop of my Bluetooth and beginning to snake around my neck.With my freed hand, I stuck my lighter into the hand Brianna was still pinning by the sleeve and pulled one of the modified travel aerosol cans from my pocket. I lit the lighter again, and in the frozen moment when Brianna realized what I was about to do, sprayed a jet of purple, air freshener flames into her face.She screeched and scampered backward into the woods. Not for long, I knew. Only long enough to heal herself and try again.“Brianna!” Madison called. She was going after her. She’d make it even easier to take her. And nothing I of all people could say would stop her.Her eyes found my silhouette. “Brianna?”“Sorry,” I whispered, and pushed her over the rock shelf by the road.There was a very un-wooden snap of bone and a human scream when her elbow hit the asphalt.I ran out onto the road, on the side she couldn’t see without figuring out a way to roll herself over, and hammered heavily on three front doors before sprinting through another back yard back toward the community center. Madison’s screams summoned even more people from the houses around her than I had.Some of them had to be human still.I disentangled the remains of the Bluetooth from my hair and held it to my cheek. “Accomplished,” I whispered to Aldo before turning it off and dropping it in my pocket. Haley nearly dropped the laundry basket she’d just begun to lower down the stairs when I caught up with her.“That was... where were you?”Not for the first time, I wondered if normal people found saying the right thing this frequently outright impossible. “I told you I’d be fine.”We were both safe, no one was in trouble. I doubted Haley’s look of questioning reproach would extend to changing that. Unless someone had seen me running from Madison’s accident. Then she’d tell the whole truth, and I’d probably end up on probation again. We were helping to take inventory of the remaining cookie boxes and handing over our cash envelope when Brianna caught up as well, back in one humanoid piece with only a hole in her sweatshirt, an unusually sour expression and a vague smell of smoke still hanging about her.Madison would be okay, for now. Her parents would be sure send her to Sacramento to get her arm set, to make sure it was done right, which would keep her safe for a few days, and then she’d be under close human attention for a while after. I’d put Brianna’s name forward to The Old Man. There was a good chance he’d eliminate her, or help Drake or me do it, rather than let her move away and pollute the outside world.Any worries Brianna already had about that confined themselves to a slightly less timid glance at me than usual, while Michelle counted the few fives and tens we’d brought in.“What were you two doing all day?” Brianna asked Haley and me, to the muted giggles of the few others who’d already made it back, unaware of the call we’d be getting any minute about Madison’s condition.I tried not to sigh while I picked the pine needles out of my beret.“Nothing.”

We've reached into the recesses of Prospero's twisted past to bring you these four short stories, and endeavored to stay about as spoiler-free as the back cover with regard to the present day storyline, so whether you've already read Splinters or not, tune in every Sunday night in October for a fresh tale of the dark and clandestine history of everyone's favorite Splinter-infested small town!

These arguments only ever came up around Halloween time.Jack started, “All I’m sayin’ is-”“What you’re saying is wrong,” Bill said.“Look, are you gonna let me finish or-”“I’ll let you finish when you start talking sense,” Bill said.“Look, do we live in America or some Soviet hellhole where free speech means shit?” Jack protested.“My van, my determination on what counts as free speech,” Bill said.“Awww, come on, give him a chance to make his case,” Annie said, leaning over to Bill in the driver’s seat and kissing his ear. “Even if he’s dead wrong, you know I enjoy watching you two argue.”I couldn’t see it, but I knew Bill was rolling his eyes then.“Fine, you may proceed,” he said.“Thank you,” Jack said, tipping her a nod. “All I’m sayin’ is, in a completely objective, fair fight, that I do believe Jason Voorhees would defeat Michael Myers.”Bill snorted, turning to his girlfriend, “You hear these lies?”“I do,” Annie said. She turned back to face us. Well, more me and Jack, really. Ned and Brenda were sitting in front of us, but they were more into making out than Jack and Bill’s argument on horror movies. “Go on, Jack, back yourself up here.”Jack was just getting started, “Well, first, Jason’s got a cooler mask.”“If you’re Canadian,” Bill said.Brenda pushed herself away from Ned long enough to say, “Hey, my mom’s Canadian.”“No offense intended,” Bill said.“She didn’t take any,” Ned said, pulling Brenda back to him.“Even so, the hockey mask’s cooler,” Jack said.“If he didn’t change masks every movie, you might have a point,” Bill said.“He’s only been in two movies. The hockey mask could stick!” Jack said.“Still doesn’t hold a candle to Michael Myers’. Pure blank equals pure terror,” Bill said.“It’s not blank. It’s just a William Shatner mask, painted white,” I said.“Bullshit,” Bill said.“You really oughta read Fangoria more,” I said. “They got a lotta cool stuff like that.”“You’re serious?” he asked me, then turning to Annie. “He’s serious?”She turned back to me and smiled, “Yeah. You do need to read more Fangoria, and it is a spray-painted Captain Kirk mask.”I blushed. Annie could always do that to me. I’d liked her since, well forever, I guess. It was hard not to, really, being that she was the prettiest girl in a small town in the middle of nowhere (the fact that in addition to being cute and having curly brown hair, which I always liked, she really filled out like crazy when puberty hit her, certainly helped). Of course, being that she was the way she was, there was a lot of competition, and I didn’t have a lot to offer.Bill did.He was my best friend for pretty much that same forever. He was smart, buff, good-looking, funny and most important of all, confident. He didn’t have any problem chasing after Annie. He didn’t have to be afraid of screwing up, not like me.The one thing I had over him, the one thing he didn’t know as well as he thought he did, was horror movies. We’d seen all the same movies, binged on all the late-night showings down at the Canterbury Theatre in Prospero. He’d seen the movies.I absorbed them. I let them in.Maybe that explained why I couldn’t get a date.“Are you sure we’re goin’ in the right direction?” Jack asked, craning his neck around to peek out of one of the van’s rear windows and seeing nothing but the endless woods we’d been watching for the past fifteen minutes.Annie checked the map, “You did take the third dirt road off Douriff?”“The one with the sign marked Tillerman Road?” Bill asked.“I wouldn’t call that a sign,” Annie said.“Well, I wouldn’t really call this a road either,” Bill said, a heavy bump that nearly sent us all flying backing him up.“True,” Annie said.“But I did take it,” Bill said.She turned back to Jack, “Then yeah, we’re going the right direction. Twenty minutes down Tillerman Road if you take it safe, pass through the creek…”“…which we just did,” Bill said.“…then just a few more minutes and we’re there,” Annie said, showing that smile to Jack that made it impossible to argue with her.“It also means we’re now legally in Prospero,” Bill said with a dramatic shudder.Ned broke off from Brenda long enough to say, “Screw Prospero.”“Screw Prospero,” Jack and Bill agreed.Prospero.The name brought a shudder. Bill, Jack and Ned reacted to Prospero the way they did because they were on our school’s football team, the Braiwood Tigers, and if you knew what was good for you, you trashed Prospero and their terrible, terrible football team, the Prospero Poets, every chance you got.I shuddered because of the stories.Everybody had heard them. That Prospero was home to aliens and monsters, that people disappeared in these woods all the time, that there were ghosts, and killers, and Bigfoot…I knew they weren’t true. They couldn’t be true. They weren’t any more true than the movies we’d snuck in to see and now could pay for because hey, we could do R-rated movies now. I knew the difference between real and make believe, but there were parts of my mind that didn’t, and tell them, yell at them, scream at them as much as I might, they still couldn’t shake that belief that the monsters under my bed and the fairy stories the big kids tell about the woods outside Prospero just might be real. Not all of them, but maybe, just maybe some of them…“Anyway, the mask’s immaterial. Purely cosmetic,” Bill said. “Michael was first. He was the groundbreaker, the one Jason copied.”Actually The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Black Christmas both beat Halloween by a few years, and that’s if we don’t count Psycho as the granddaddy of them all, not that I was going to correct them.“Legacy don’t mean shit in a one on one fight,” Jack said. “Besides, if I’m still countin’ points, my second one’s a better one.”“Oh yeah?” Bill challenged.“Yeah, Jason’s diversified. Michael’s just into his knives. Jason’s got machetes, pick-axes, knives, knitting needles…”“And Michael’s unstoppable!”“Yeah, ‘cept if you shoot out his eyes and set him on fire!”Bill looked at me in the rearview mirror, “Drake, man, back me up here?”I shrugged. He wouldn’t like my answer, but I was having fun and looking for an excuse to jump into the conversation, “Honestly? I think Cropsey could take them both.”Bill shook his head, “I should’ve known.”“Nice,” Annie said.As usual, Jack was much less diplomatic, “Cropsey? Seriously?”“He’s faster! He’s just as strong! And he’s got those shears! I mean, did you see that raft scene?”Jack laughed, “Next you’re gonna be makin’ a case for Harry Warden or Frank Zito. Or, hey, I know, why don’t you try to bring The Thing into it again.”All right, now things were getting personal, “Hey, The Thing’s a good movie, if only enough people saw it-”Bill pulled the van to a stop, “We’re here.”Finally.Jack and I got out the back of the van, Bill and Annie the front. Ned and Brenda stayed exactly where they were. If they got as far as it looked like they were gonna get, I began to think hitchhiking home might not be an awful idea.Freeling Farm loomed before us. Its name was far more impressive than the reality, naturally. There was an ancient-looking and overgrown farmhouse with a rusted out hulk in front of it that might have once been a pickup truck, and an even more dilapidated barn with half of its roof caved in. Halfway between them was the stump of a tree with an old ax sticking out of it. It looked like the kind of place one of our movies would take place in, and if they’d taught me anything it’d have been to run then and there and never look back, maybe while tossing a road flare in to make sure the evil was gone for good.But that wasn’t what we were here to do, was it?No. Being that Bill also happened to be Bill Freeling, and being that his mother had recently inherited it from his grandfather, the farm was now his responsibility, sort of. I mean, yeah, his parents owned it, but they barely had time to do anything with it these days, certainly not until winter had passed. Until then, they’d put it on Bill to look the place over, see if there was anything worth salvaging or if they’d be better off just selling the land.A sharp breeze picked up, knocking a couple slats from the roof.Yeah, selling the land was looking pretty good.“Oh yeah, this looks like fun,” Jack said. Looking back at the van as it started to rock, he added, “Kinda wish I was in there.”“Join them if you want, but we got some work to do here. It’ll take maybe an hour or two, but we need to check the place from top to bottom. House, barn, orchard, anything inside the fence, it belongs to my folks,” Bill said.“This’ll go faster if we get them to join us,” Jack said, motioning to the van.It had started rocking faster. Bill said, “They won’t be much longer. Come on, if we split up we can get this done a lot faster.”“I’ll take the barn,” Jack said, zipping up his jacket and making tracks away from the house. Of course he wanted the barn, that’d take, what, five minutes to determine that was useless? The pockets of his letterman’s jacket always had at least two joints hidden in the lining. Odds on he’d be smoking up long before trying to figure out how useless that barn was.“Guess that means we’ll take the house and orchard,” Bill said, leading the way to the porch.I didn’t like the looks of any of this. Not the barn. Not the house. Not the woods.Not Prospero.It was stupid. Silly. Too many movies making me think too many things, but it all seemed too familiar.Annie put her hand on my arm, “Are you okay?”“I’m fine,” I said, feeling more strength from her. “Just fine.”“Cool,” she said. “Come on, let’s stick together, this place freaks me out.”Suddenly I felt a whole lot stronger.We joined Bill on the porch in time to see the front door fall inward with a heavy, clattering thud.“You broke it,” I joked.“No I didn’t,” Bill said, picking the door back up. “It was like that when I got here. Like it had already broken off but someone laid it against the door.”“Your grandparents?” Annie asked.“Maybe, but I don’t think so,” Bill said. “More likely squatters.”So much for all that fear going away, “Do you think they might still be here?”Bill sounded confident, “Doubt it, not with weather getting this cold, but just to be safe…”He ran back to the van and slid open the side door. I could hear Ned and Brenda cursing at him and him yelling something about this being his van before he jogged back, carrying a new-looking hunting rifle.“What the hell is that?” I asked.Bill smiled, “My seventeenth birthday present. Oughta make any squatters think twice, don’t you think?”I can’t say how skeptical I looked, but it couldn’t have been nearly as much as Annie.Bill called the ground floor, and I got the second. Annie was eager to take the basement, but Bill didn’t want her to go down there alone, which meant she had to stick with one of us. I’m sure Bill meant for her to join him, but she decided to join me instead, which, while being kind of awesome, kind of set me on edge. I liked her, but I liked being friends with Bill too; I didn’t want to get in the middle.We wandered the second floor for a few minutes in silence, taking in every detail that seemed to back up Bill’s squatter theory. There was dust on the floor, sort of, but it looked like someone had swept a path in the middle of the creaky hardwood floor, if not very well. There were wide, heavy footprints the size of diving flippers that made me laughingly think of the Bigfoot stories again (at least I wanted to think they were just stories).And then there was the bedroom.Most of the bedrooms were every bit as dilapidated as the rest of the house, but the master bedroom had been cleaned up not that long ago by the looks of things. The bed frame was bent and discarded in a corner of the room, its saggy mattress holding place of pride in the middle of the room, though covered with about an extra foot of leaves and grass twisted into some kind of giant nest. The dresser was empty save for a small shrine of cheap trinkets and pieces of brightly colored trash that looked like the kinds of things people would have lost or thrown away on hikes; soda cans, emergency whistles, a retainer case. More odds and ends trinkets hung from the ceiling on pieces of string.“Whoever was here was really weird,” Annie said.“Yeah. I mean… it’s like someone’s pretending to be a person but doesn’t quite know what they’re doing. Like an animal at the zoo that’s only seen people from a distance and thinks it can escape if it does what it sees everyone else doing,” I said.“Like they’re playing house?” she asked.“Something like that, yeah,” I said.Annie looked at me a little oddly, “All right, maybe they weren’t quite as weird as you.”“Hey, I just call them like I see them,” I said.Bill yelled from downstairs, “You guys find anything?”“Nothing good!” Annie yelled back.“There’s nothing down here either! Give it another ten minutes, then I say we head home!” Bill yelled.“Works for me,” I muttered. It was getting colder by the minute and the air was feeling wet. It wouldn’t be long before it’d start storming, I knew it. And of course there was also that unpleasant feeling that whoever was in here hadn’t been gone long enough.She turned her eyes to me, “So… you got any plans on November 9th?”Like she had to ask; I had that day marked on my calendar. Two movies came out that day: A Nightmare on Elm Street and Silent Night, Deadly Night. The other guys were arguing about which one to see. They both had cool posters, and they both sounded pretty scary. Nightmare had Wes Craven behind it, and sounded like it had a pretty trippy story, but Silent Night had a guy killing people dressed as Santa, and there were rumblings among local parents that they might put on a protest against it.If they were going to protest it, it had to be good, right?Still, while the other guys were arguing between them, I had a far more pragmatic solution.“Double feature,” I said.She smiled, “A man after my own heart. Want some company?”“Well, sure, I mean a bunch of us were going to go and-”“No,” she said. “I mean… would you maybe think about wanting to go with just me. I mean, just you and me.”She must have seen my confusion, because she quickly added, “You know, like, a date?”Oh. So that was what she meant.Every fiber of my being just wanted to scream yes right then and there. Unfortunately there were more rational parts of my brain that wanted to question this good fortune, and even investigate the matter further.“Why?” I asked.“Because you’re nice, and you’re not that bad-looking in the right light?” she said, a playful smile forming on her very cute lips.“No, what I meant… I mean, what I mean… Bill. Bill’s what I mean,” I said. Bill wasn’t just an obstacle between us. Bill was also my best friend. He was the guy who’d protected me from bullies ever since the third grade, not because he wanted anything from me or because I had toys he liked to play with, but just because that was what was right, and that was the kind of guy he was. Whenever I was short some change for the ice cream truck, he’d cover me, and sometimes he’d just show up to hang out with a new issue of my favorite comic that he was finished reading and give it to me.We argued like friends, sure, but we were still friends, and I valued that a lot.“Bill and me… we’re not working out, I don’t think,” Annie said. “I mean, I like him, he’s still really cool and all, but whenever we’re together it’s like I’m not the most important thing to him. You’ve always been so nice, and so sweet. You’ve always been a friend. And I know you like me. I know you’ve always liked me,” she said.“Bill told you?” I asked.“He didn’t have to, but he did verify,” she said. “Come on. Why don’t you just take a chance and let me take care of Bill?”Great. Just great. All I had to do was say ‘yes’ and I’d get everything I’d ever wanted, but I’d probably lose my best friend in the world.It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair at all.But it also demanded an answer.“Annie, I-” BLAM!There was a gunshot outside. A pained, short squeal.“Bill,” Annie said beneath her breath, running down the hall and hitting the stairs before I’d even figured out just what happened. Then I was after her.I caught up to her at the house’s overgrown front lawn.“Bill!” she called out. “BILL!”He didn’t answer.I put my hand on her shoulder, “It’s probably just him and Jack messing around. Trying to give us a scare.”They always liked pulling jokes, the more messed up the better. I know Bill saw how scared I was, I didn’t put it past him to pull something with Jack to give me a good scare. Maybe even with Annie, making her give that speech to take me off guard…No. She’d never do anything like that.“I don’t know,” Annie said. She walked over to the van. Its sliding side door was wide open. Ned and Brenda were gone. Their clothes still covered the seat and floor, but they were nowhere to be found.Even more disconcerting was the single drop of blood on the floor.“What the hell?” Annie said.My fear sensors were in overdrive.“We have to get out of here,” I said. “We have to call for help.”“No, it’s like you said, it’s probably a joke,” she said, rifling through the various tool and gear boxes that Bill kept on the floor of his van. She opened one, spilling flares all over the ground, before she found what she wanted: a heavy tire iron.“You pulled that out for a joke?” I said.“No,” she said. “In case it isn’t.”There were drag marks on the ground, carving a path through the dry, tangled grass leading to the barn but no more blood at least, which was more comforting. Annie led the way confidently, holding the tire iron in front of her as if it were some sort of mythical sword that could slay dragons with a single swing.“Bill? Jack? Brenda? Ned? You all in there? Are you pulling some kind of joke?” she called out, the closer we got to the barn.I pulled at the back of her shirt, “Please, Annie, we need to get the hell out of here. I got a really bad, I really, really got a bad feeling about this. Let’s just-”“Please,” she said as we got to one of the large barn doors. “This is all just-”She swung the door open, and the first thing I caught was the roar of thousands of flies in the air. Then the smell. Meat, rotten. The coppery smell of blood. I bent over, trying not to puke and failing.When I got up is when I saw the bodies. I saw the animals first, raccoons and dogs and cats and squirrels and maybe even a couple deer, butchered and half-eaten on the ground, a couple hanging from ropes from the ceiling like those things we found in the master bedroom.Then I saw the people. There were three, maybe four that had been here a while, down to mostly dry, taut skin and broken shards of skeleton. The four closest to us, though, were fresh.Ned, near-naked, with half his skull caved in. Bill with his throat mangled. Brenda and Jack hung upside-down from ropes. Jack was missing an arm and was clearly dead. Brenda was bleeding and in her underwear, but alive, moaning lowly for help as she reached for us.If the thing eating Jack’s arm hadn’t seen us first, we might have even gone to help her.It was shaped like a man, but wasn’t. It was taller, more muscular than any man could be, with a muted, bearlike face and a body covered in shaggy, black fur. Its feet were massive and powerful, and its hands ended in thick claws. It was like some animal that had wanted to look like a human and was doing a piss-poor imitation.It turned to us, growling and coughing, its eyes too human and staring at us.Bigfoot.No, it couldn’t be Bigfoot. It wasn’t Bigfoot. There was no such thing as Bigfoot just like there was no such thing as monsters or horror movie bad guys. There was no Jason, no Michael, no Cropsey. Things like that didn’t exist in the real world. People like Jack and Ned and Bill didn’t just die, they didn’t just.Annie didn’t scream when the thing stood to its full height, but I knew she wanted to. I wanted to. Maybe I did. Everything then just started to blur.The creature growled, “Mine.”What the he-It cleared the distance to us in two quick steps, wrapping its arms around Annie. She didn’t even scream, didn’t even try to swing her tire iron. One second she was embraced by the beast like she was its long-lost daughter it hadn’t seen in decades, the next there was a thick twisting cracking sound and I could see her head on the floor seconds before the creature actually dropped her body.I screamed.I ran.I had to make it to the van. I didn’t have my license. Maybe I’d get in trouble. Maybe getting in trouble would be good. Maybe… Oh Christ, Annie… ANNIE! WHAT THE HELL HAPPEN-A heavy weight slammed into my back, and I was sailing through the air.I hit the ground hard, rolling into the stump.The creature was every bit as horrible in the light, maybe even worse. If anything it seemed to have grown. Its fur wriggled like worms as its mouth curled into a snarl. Teeth like a wolf’s mixed with teeth like a rattlesnake’s as it hissed and roared at me.“MINE!”It charged. Something in me had snapped, clearly, because there was no way in hell I could have gotten to my feet on my own. No way I could have circled around that stump and grabbed that ax stuck in the wood. No way I could have ripped it out and swung it into the beast’s jaw.There was no way I should have seen that jaw fly away in a trail of thick, blackish-red blood that spattered heavy on the ground.No way at all.But it happened. It did. And I did it.But just like there was no way I could have done that, there was no way it should have still been standing, roaring and pissed off at me. There was no way it should have made that snapping, splintering wood sound with tentacles and clawlike, fingerlike appendages bursting out of that place where its lower jaw should have been.That shouldn’t have happened.Me running away should have, and that did happen, so at least some of the day made sense.Bill left the keys in the ignition, he would have left them there so Ned and Brenda could have the radio. All I needed to do was… Annie. No. Why’d you have to, why…I couldn’t see it but I could hear it running after me. I knew it would catch me. I knew it would do to me like it did to the others though maybe, no, probably worse.And so maybe that’s why I let the autopilot kick in again. I dodged to the side and stopped, let it barrel into the van. It hit hard, knocking the van onto its side. The creature fell down, stunned.I took the chance and went crazy on it with the ax. I chopped it in the back, over and over and over, not letting up, never stopping, splattering its thick, wriggling blood everywhere. Some of it got onto my jacket and tried crawling to me, kept trying to get to my face, so I just threw off the jacket. The beast itself kept pulling itself together, reattaching parts I’d chopped off and growing new parts, growing bigger and stronger and turning to me, eyes coming out of every new wound I made.I was going mad. I knew that then, but I didn’t care. I knew what it had done, and I knew what I would have to do.I swung the ax into the van’s gas tank, watched it spill all over the creature.I found one of the flares that Annie had dropped. I lit it.Then I lit the creature and the van up.I ran off before the gas tank itself blew, but I stood watch, holding my bloody ax as I watched the creature scream and burn into a pile of nothingness.I collapsed to the ground, screaming and crying and laughing and wondering just what the hell I was going to tell the world. This was, after all, the part of the movies they always left out. You always saw the heroine (never the hero, there was never a hero in the end) getting carted away, to be taken care of, maybe to return in a sequel but probably not. You never saw them have to justify what they’d done, to explain to a world that could never believe them. You never saw… You never saw…The tears came in a torrent. Annie. Annie. Why, god, why…“Not bad, kid. Not bad at all,” the voice behind me said.I turned, autopilot raising my ax high. There were three of them. A large man in a heavy coat wearing a fedora and sunglasses, a middle-aged woman holding a rifle and a boy who couldn’t have been older than twelve, also holding an ax. The large man was older than them both. His smile was unpleasant, but not nearly as unpleasant as the curved iron hook where his right hand should have been.“Killed yourself a bear-Splinter on your first try. I seen experienced hunters who couldn’t do that without some help from yours truly,” he said.“Who are you?” I asked. “What was that?”“Who I am ain’t relevant. What that is, is the greatest plague mankind has ever seen. These monsters wanna be us, and some of ‘em are better at pretendin’ it than others. This guy you just torched, he’s one of the others. They can try to walk like us, to talk like us, even kill like us, but they ain’t us. And he ain’t the only one in this here forest now. This is a busy time of year, and if we don’t do somethin’ about them soon, they’re gonna be a problem. So lemme now ask you somethin’, boy. What’s your name?” he asked.“Drake. Drake Tymon,” I said.“Well, Drake Tymon, you ready to join the war?” he said.Jack. Ned. Bill. Annie.“When do we start?” I asked.

There's something rotten beneath the small town of Prospero, California. For over a century, the town's history has been rich with tales of monsters, miracles and mysterious disappearances in the surrounding woods. It’s a town where everybody has something to hide, especially those who may not be entirely human.

Sixteen-year-old Mina Todd knows about the otherworldly shapeshifters that secretly run Prospero and has dedicated her life to fighting them. Ben Pastor, in town to attend the funeral of his missing childhood friend, Haley Perkins, has never believed any of the strange stories about what happens in Prospero. When Haley turns up alive and well at her own memorial service, Ben and Mina are forced to work together to uncover what happened to her. Though they may not always understand each other, Ben and Mina’s unlikely friendship may very well be the only thing that can save the town, and possibly the world, from its insidious invaders.

We've reached into the recesses of Prospero's twisted past to bring you these four short stories, and endeavored to stay about as spoiler-free as the back cover with regard to the present day storyline, so whether you've already read Splinters or not, tune in every Sunday night in October for a fresh tale of the dark and clandestine history of everyone's favorite Splinter-infested small town!

I could have gone home for summer break.I could have been watching Bewitched on the couch like I’d never been away, fan on full blast, pretending there was no such thing as a Geometry prerequisite.We’re adults, Keith said. We can go where we want now, he said.So on the second day of summer break, we, Keith’s cousin Sharon, and far too much luggage were jammed into the already sweltering heat of his new VW bus, going where he wanted to go. That meant Roswell, New Mexico, by way of every place on the way down from Berkeley where anyone had ever claimed to have seen anything remotely, potentially, vaguely related to aliens.I’d had no idea there were so many such places, even accounting for the fact that Keith’s definition of “on the way” spat in the face of even my understanding of geometry.“We’re going to be the ones, I can feel it!” Keith’s energy for this project remained undampened by the fact that we were now seven hours into our second driving day, creeping ever further south, into the smothering warm. And we weren’t close to what could be called Southern California yet. Hell, we weren’t even south of home yet after all of yesterday’s detours. “This is the summer the lid gets blown off of the whole cover up! One of these places has to have the key to introducing humanity to the outside universe once and for all, no going back. The truth never stays buried for good!”“Of course not,” Sharon yawned, rolling over on the makeshift couch across from me, resting her head the map she hadn’t needed to glance at for the last two hours of straight highway. “And now all we have to do is find the loose end that experts have devoted their whole lives to looking for, in three weeks of touring the most obvious places. But hey, if we don’t, we’ll still come home with some cool t-shirts.”“Ah, but we have something those ‘experts’ don’t!” Keith answered readily, as animated as an overeager professor trying to engage a class on a day this hot. “Incorruptibility!”I’d been expecting something a little better. Sharon obviously hadn’t.“Right,” she crossed her fingers conspicuously behind her back and rolled her eyes at me. “We’ve obviously got that.”Keith may have had a little help talking me into roasting myself alive in the name of one of his quests. Like his little cousin casually inquiring whether I’d be coming along too.It was my first and last summer with the advantage of being the cool older college guy, before she’d start classes in the fall. At least, I hoped I was the cool older college guy. It was worth trying to make the most of while it lasted.“I know I’m one of the only three incorruptible people in the world,” I said, “aren’t you?”Sharon snorted out loud and buried her face in one of the bright green cushions.Instead of arguing with us, Keith swerved hard to the right and slammed on the brakes, sending me sideways into the back of his seat. Sharon braced herself against her pillow niche to avoid hitting her head. “Here it is,” he said, beckoning us to look at the sign he’d almost hit on the shoulder. Welcome to ProsperoPopulation: 4350The sign was slightly askew, as if someone before Keith had topped his enthusiasm, or failed to match his precision on the pine-needle-carpeted asphalt. “Never heard of the place,” I answered Keith’s expectant gesture. “And you thought I only knew the obvious places,” he aimed at Sharon. “Not many people have,” he told me, “but Prospero is easily one of the top five towns in the country for verifiable paranormal history.”“How verifiable?” One of us was obviously supposed to ask. And I wanted to know. A little. “Well, ignoring the dozens of Bigfoot sightings,”“Yes, let’s ignore those,” Sharon agreed.“Ignoring those and about a hundred other one-time incidents no one on earth seems able to explain, Prospero happens to be the home of Kirby Ridge.”“I think he’s holding for applause,” I said to Sharon after a few seconds of silence. “Let him hold,” she said. Keith broke the silence himself with a sigh and the crunch of pulling back onto the highway out of the needly ditch. “Kirby Ridge, in turn,” he explained, “is home to the only known nocturnal luminescence that has yet to be explained publically by science and is predictable to within seven minutes with a ninety-five percent success rate. Is that verifiable enough for you?”I was watching the farms and gas stations of the Prospero outskirts cut into the surrounding forest and outcroppings of rock more than I was listening. It wasn’t until Keith turned onto the unimaginatively named Main Street that anything distinguished this town from the one we had passed before it, or the one before that.The shops had a kitschier, more welcoming front, in need of repair in places, but without giving the feeling that their remoteness was a matter of ardent preference rather than geographic circumstance. A building that could once have been a movie theater announced itself in bold letters on every side as the Prospero Museum of Unnatural History. “So, what you’re saying is we’re going to see a light show?” Sharon translated. “Best and most important light show in the solar system,” Keith confirmed. “Wherever it comes from, it’s been playing every twenty-nine days in the same place, twelve minutes after full sunset. We’re going to figure out who’s putting it on and what it means.”Suddenly the time Keith had insisted on spending zigzagging up through the national parks almost to the Oregon border yesterday made a lot more sense. Now sun was already dipping behind those jagged, redwood-covered hills on what was presumably the 29th day by Keith’s count. He steered us away from the relative hominess of Main Street, up to the hillier, darker far edge, and pulled over next to a vacant lot, thick with grass and saplings, half fenced in and looking as though it had been vacant longer than it had been anything else. The makeshift path up through the damaged chain link was marked ahead by a roadside booth that could barely be seen through the cloud of smoke wafting out of it, carrying the scent of charcoal and fresh corn.On this traffic-less summer Sunday evening, it had taken less than five minutes to cross from the nowhere on one side of Prospero to the nowhere on the other. Friendly town or not, I had the feeling there weren’t any motels nearby that had made it into our guidebook. Keith looked around at the shades of green visible through the windshield with a satisfied nod and set about rolling a joint, his sign at the end of every day that the driving was finished. Sleeping in the bus it was. Again. Sharon snapped a Polaroid and scooted back to the rear before Keith could, in spite of all his legalization pride, snatch it out of her fingers. “People will want to see the man who ushered in the next scientific revolution before it all happened!” The print clicked against her hand as she tried to shake it and shield it from view at the same time. “You look very sophisticated,” she assessed.“Expands the mind,” he said on the exhale of his first long drag.“A head your size has room for it,” said Sharon, showing us the newly visible distorted image of said head looking larger than usual. “Just for that, you don’t get any,” said Keith, lighting and handing me the second one. I shrugged at Sharon and took a pull on it, but only one. I could never stay on opposite sides with her for more than a few seconds, even in fun.I gave Sharon mine. “You need all our minds expanded if you want to find anything, right?”With an exaggerated sigh, Keith rolled me another. Thank god. Not knowing how long we were going to be sitting in that lot staring at the sky, I wanted to be able to enjoy whatever light show did appear. This first real stop on our quest could have been more comfortingly touristy, but it could have been less so too, I supposed. There was a decent sized gathering already in the lot once we got past the first rise of uneven earth, and the night was young. A fair number seemed to be people like us, college aged, passing through, dressed for vacation with unmistakably new white sneakers.Even those who were obviously local greeted us with pleasant smiles. I went straight for the roasted corn booth at the outer edge of the fence, Sharon and Keith falling in next to me without debate.It had been three hours since our last rest stop, and we had only picked up coke and pretzels. “Where you kids visiting from?” the woman behind the grill asked. She was round and cheerful and reminded me, with a dose of homesickness, of Mom. “Berkeley,” Keith answered for us all, though it wasn’t quite true for Sharon yet.So much cooler to say than San Francisco, where we were actually from, if we were to get technical.“For school?” she guessed.We all nodded with some unavoidable pride.“I think that’s wonderful,” she said, buttering the three ears of corn at once with the grace of a slight-of-hand magician. “Learning a lot? Making lots of friends?”We nodded again, though I couldn’t honestly claim to have made any friends I hadn’t had before. Lots of acquaintances. Not friends.I only realized when the woman’s eyes drifted over my head that Keith was still smoking. She took a deep breath of the mingled flavors of smoke and thankfully didn’t look disapproving. Interested, maybe. A little envious, even. “Wonderful,” she repeated, handing us each one of the ears by the napkin-wrapped husk.For the amount of research Keith had clearly put into this trip, he’d left us comparatively unprepared for the details. Camera and notebook he had. Bag full of all the mind-expansion we could need he had as well.Blankets and deck chairs we did not have, so we stretched out on the thick, bare, and thankfully dew-less grass to eat and smoke and wait for the sky to light up.I spotted a few “Stop the Conspiracy” t-shirts in the crowd before it got too dark to make them out.A girl of maybe eleven or twelve walked among the groups, selling Frisbees decorated to look like flying saucers, which were soon flying over the picnicker’s heads at regular intervals.We declined the Frisbees, but I bought a packet of “Official Kirby Rige Lights Sparklers” from her.I wondered if she’d made (and spelled) all the labels herself.By the time the first lights appeared between the trees at the side of the lot opposite the road, I’m not sure what I’d come to expect. An artificially manufactured spectacle, or nothing at all, either would have been unsurprising.This, though, did look like a naturally occurring phenomenon, though not like any I’d ever seen or read about before.A sphere of glowing green broke over the treetops like another world’s moonrise, too pronounced to be imagination feeding off the expectant atmosphere, too subtle to be a show, unless it was a far more calculated and expertly executed one than the home of “Official Kirby Rige Lights Sparklers” was likely to be capable of.The green sphere drifted upward like a lost balloon in slow motion, growing fainter as it rose until it could no longer be distinguished against the dark sky, but before it was gone, it was followed by a violet one to its right and a delicate, golden-white one on its left. That was all it was, spheres of light floating up and fading away, leaving room for more, and a faint green glow surrounding the treetops, or maybe it was only a reflection of the glowing orbs.The slow, endless flow of them was difficult to look away from. Would have been, I imagined, even without the weed, in the way a campfire, or a lava lamp, or a kaleidoscope compels you to keep looking at it as though you might miss something.I was so engrossed in the view that I startled when Sharon elbowed me in the side and directed my attention with a jerk of her head.Keith was on his feet, treading carefully, purposefully between the picnic blankets toward the lights, notebook in hand and camera strap around his neck.Though the lights made no noise, sitting under them felt like being in a movie theater, and I couldn’t bring myself to speak up over everyone else’s silence, so I followed Sharon in following Keith at a quick tiptoe.“Where are we going?” I whispered once we drew even with him, though I was afraid I probably knew the answer already.“For a real look,” he had the decency, or perhaps the paranoia, to whisper back. “I told you we were going to be the ones to find something.”I expected someone to stop us before we reached the treeline where the relative openness of the lot ended without fence or sign or other man-made boundary.I hoped someone would stop us. It was dark, I was tired, I’d been limiting my fluid intake to handle the lack of bathrooms on the road for long enough to make slightly weak and bring on a dull headache, and I certainly couldn’t count on my sense of direction to bring us back to civilization when Keith was ready to join us there.The attendant at another food booth near the edge followed us with his eyes, signaled to a nearby man in a button-down shirt who might have been some sort of unofficial event security, and they exchanged a few whispers, their heads bent so close together that they must have been touching, but no one made a move toward us.Maybe it wasn’t only that I was tired. Maybe I looked back at all those faces staring up into the sky as one and thought they had the right idea. When we see this, we sit in groups at a safe distance and watch. Something about that felt like human instinct, like not putting your hand in that fascinating campfire. Something not to be messed with.Or maybe that was just stoned wisdom. I’d wake up tomorrow marveling that I’d momentarily found that thought of mine deep. For now, Keith was feeling his way into the dimly backlit trees, Sharon was rolling her eyes behind his back at me even while she followed, and I was following her.The floating lights couldn’t be seen properly from under the tree canopy, but the soft, ambient glow they gave off became brighter the further we stumbled toward them, until we were nearly able to stop stumbling, able to see enough of the roots and rocks in our way.“We come in peace!” Sharon called out when we were too far from the lot to disturb its silence, then giggled. “Or, I guess, we receive you in peace? Since it is our planet, and you’re the ones coming?”Then she lapsed into giggles too thick for more words, maybe at her own crude innuendo, maybe at nothing at all.“Shhh!” Keith hissed at her, raising a hand behind him at both of us. Sharon humored him by pressing her own hand to her mouth to stifle the sound. “I heard something.”He squinted into the fluctuating green and purple dimness ahead, and I squinted with him, expecting a trick of the shifting light, then seeing a trick of the shifting light, and finally understanding, with a drop of my stomach, that it wasn’t a trick of the light at all.Three short figures stood among the trees ahead, naked and gray and featureless, except for their tiny, shapeless mouths and the huge black eyes that took up most of their disproportionately large, elongated heads.The one in the middle opened its tiny mouth, and it took a few words before I realized that the rasping, clicking, mechanical sound that came out was English.“In present company, little ones,” it said, “we are not the newcomers to this world.”Sharon screamed, and at first I thought it was only for the reason I knew I would scream myself if I could get my throat to respond.Then her feet left the ground next to me.I reached for her, tried to make out what was happening, wildly imagining glowing tractor beams or the glittering remains of teleportation.All I could see were the arms of a fourth creature, wrapping around her, extending far longer than the creature itself, and yanking her up into the tree with a creaking, cracking wooden sound that made me sure the whole tree would collapse under them.It didn’t. There was a crashing rustle in the next tree, and the next, and by the time I thought to get one of the sparklers out of the packet and light it to see by, the branches above me were empty.The three figures in front of us had not moved since announcing themselves.Or, rather, the four figures in front of me hadn’t moved since that time.“Keith?”He was so completely motionless that I wondered if the creature had done something to freeze him that way. Then he looked me with the halting turn of a music box dancer.“It...” he looked like he wanted me to take the words out of his mouth, but I didn’t know them. “It wasn’t supposed to be real,” he whispered.For a few seconds, he seemed to wait for me to understand him. Then he shoved me aside, into the nearest splintery trunk, and bolted past me, down the hill toward the bus.“Keith!” He didn’t look back. “Keith!”I started after him, slipped on the uneven dirt, dousing my sparkler in it, and realized in the time it took to get my weight back on my feet by way of my freshly skinned elbows, that the passing seconds would probably be better spent chasing after the screams coming from the opposite direction.“Sharon!”She didn’t call back, not exactly. There was plenty of noise to follow, though. Her screams themselves were muffled by the thunder of their thrashing through the underbrush. I nearly overshot when I caught up. The bushes were shaking for yards in every direction, and the creature that had wrapped itself almost entirely around her had also gone a reddish brown color and begun to sprout camouflaging pine needles. I could only tell exactly where in the mess she was when she grabbed my ankle. I lit a fresh sparkler, accidentally spilling blue-and-yellow sparks from the cheap thing all over the tangle of Sharon and the creature. The twisted, redwood-camouflaged limbs of the thing bubbled and charred where the sparks made contact, and a sound of pained protest seemed to come from the whole thing at once.It was something.“Sorry,” I told Sharon. “Brace yourself.”Her hand tightened painfully but comfortingly around my ankle, since I didn’t have enough hands to grab her as well.I slid the rest of the packet’s contents halfway out of it, lit all the ends at once, then broke them off and let them rain down all over the thing, mini fireworks coating the stretching red and green and grey skin trapping and inadvertently protecting Sharon.The creature sizzled and withdrew with a screech and another several snaps of breaking wood, though it barely touched the bushes around it. The wood almost sounded like it was inside the thing.Once Sharon was able to wriggle a second hand loose, I grabbed both of hers and pulled, she kicked the smoldering mass free from the rest of her. We both stood for a moment, absorbing the fact that it was quickly recovering, returning to its alien shape with more of that splintering noise, the burns fading out, crouching over the hole in the ground I’d found it and Sharon struggling in.There was no ship, saucer-shaped or otherwise, to be seen anywhere, and it had been dragging her into a burrow in the ground.“What the hell kind of aliens are you?” I asked, as if it might explain itself.“The abducting kind!” Sharon shouted the only answer that mattered, grabbing me by the shoulder of my t-shirt and pulling me forward.There were sparks alive in her hair and on her clothes, the smoke of them strong and acrid in her slipstream as we ran, not pausing to put them out, the moving air making them brighter.“Where are you going?” she whispered when our ideas of forward diverged and the link of our arms went taut.“The road!” At least, I hoped that was what I was heading toward. “Where are you going?”“Back to the ridge!”“With all those UFO nuts here to stare at the lights?”“Can you think of anyone else who might believe us?”“I don’t care who believes us!” I shouted. “I just want to go home! Please, let’s just get out of here.”She didn’t waste long thinking.“Okay.” She turned and led the way in a direction close to the one I’d guessed at.They were behind us somewhere, I was sure of it, popping and snapping, or maybe it was only the twigs under our feet.I’d never been so glad in my life for Sharon’s love of maps as I was when we tripped at the raised edge of forest and stumbled down onto the road that had been cut through it.I couldn’t see the bus, maybe we were too far from the lot, or maybe Keith had gotten here first and taken it, but there were a few stragglers on the road from the light watching. People. Safety.“Do you know where there’s a phone we can use?” I asked the first human silhouette, before recognizing her as the woman from the corn stand. “Do you know where the nearest one is in town?”I wanted to shake her for responding so slowly. Didn’t she know an emergency when she saw one?“Jim? Annie?” she called cheerfully over her shoulder.The man I’d taken for a security guard and the Frisbee-and-sparkler girl came close enough to make out in the fading light from the ridge. A few more familiar faces crowded in behind them. The man in the “Stop the Conspiracy” shirt looked on impassively.“Looks like we’ve got a couple more runners,” said the corn lady.The guard nodded and the girl smiled, cracking her knuckles with the unmistakable sound of splintering wood.

There's something rotten beneath the small town of Prospero, California. For over a century, the town's history has been rich with tales of monsters, miracles and mysterious disappearances in the surrounding woods. It’s a town where everybody has something to hide, especially those who may not be entirely human.

Sixteen-year-old Mina Todd knows about the otherworldly shapeshifters that secretly run Prospero and has dedicated her life to fighting them. Ben Pastor, in town to attend the funeral of his missing childhood friend, Haley Perkins, has never believed any of the strange stories about what happens in Prospero. When Haley turns up alive and well at her own memorial service, Ben and Mina are forced to work together to uncover what happened to her. Though they may not always understand each other, Ben and Mina’s unlikely friendship may very well be the only thing that can save the town, and possibly the world, from its insidious invaders.

We've reached into the recesses of Prospero's twisted past to bring you these four short stories, and endeavored to stay about as spoiler-free as the back cover with regard to the present day storyline, so whether you've already read Splinters or not, tune in every Sunday night in October for a fresh tale of the dark and clandestine history of everyone's favorite Splinter-infested small town!

So, without further ado, let's begin with our first tale of terror...

The Prospero Chronicles:The Stuff of LegendsBy Matt CarterJudy – 1955

I had two words and two words only for Prospero.Good riddance.There were others, too, improper words for the town’s only minister’s only daughter to know, and they would have done just as well, but the energy of summoning them was more than I wanted to give Prospero right now, or ever again.I was going, and nothing, nothing was going to stop me.Not even Frank Templeton.Greasy, skinny Frank Templeton, Frank Templeton the mechanic at Brundle’s Gas & Go, breathing heavy and rubbing his hands on his coveralls and thinking that would make a difference. Frank Templeton, chewing that disgusting knob of tobacco and spitting its juices into that empty Coke bottle shoved into his workbelt. Frank Templeton who’d had his eyes on this body for too long…One less reason to miss Prospero.Still, it never hurt to smile sweet, even if it did encourage him.“Hello, Frank. Fill ‘er up for me?” I asked.He stood stock still, staring down at me. He’d stopped chewing. Spittle began to creep down his lower lip, and that damn tobacco wouldn’t be far behind. He wasn’t looking down my blouse, I’d seen him do that before and he never looked like he did now. I could almost laugh at him if he weren’t so damn pitiable.A loud, high voice barked from the office, “Frank, ya god- I mean, ya idjit, fill up the lady’s car before it starts to rust!”Harold Brundle was the complete opposite of Frank. Short, wide, and bald. He ran, or waddled, to my car as fast as he could, running one of his hefty hands through a head of hair that hadn’t been there in decades while the other fearfully mashed up his faded blue BRUNDLE’S cap.“Sorry Miss Mills! You know Frank, always been a bit simple…” he said apologetically.“No reason to be sorry,” I said, putting my hand on one of his as I stepped out of the car.“Gee, thanks,” he said, looking relieved. Then he looked at my back seat.“Lotta bags, planning a trip?” he asked.“Moving out,” I said.“Congratulations! Always knew you were bound for bigger ‘n better things!” Harold snapped his fingers at Frank, “Check her fluids too! Don’t want this fine car breakin’ down in the middle of nowhere!”Frank didn’t look like he wanted to oblige, but finally spitting into his Coke bottle half full of sloshing, brown slime, he ambled over to the garage for his tools.“Could I talk you into coming in to the office for a minute for a Coke? Ice-cold!” Harold said. I didn’t really want one, it was an early autumn evening and the chill in the air didn’t make ice-cold sound as tempting as he wanted it to, but if it could keep some distance between Frank and me…“Sure!” I said, following him to the office.Harold led the way, “Now I didn’t mean to imply there that your car’d be rusting anytime soon, Miss Mills, I mean what I was goin’ with there’s what I think you’d call a figure-of-speech, and… and what year was that?”“1950,” I said.“1950, great year, fantastic fu- I mean, well, it’s great. What I’m sayin’ is that the Hudson Commodore like you got there is a fine automobile and it should serve you well and I mean to say that I want to do everything it takes to make it so for you,” he said.Like daddy always said, Harold Brundle was a toadie and a lickspittle, always trying to get in the good graces of Prospero’s better families. I’d never seen it for myself before, I’d always just thought it was him being nice, but seeing him like this now made all of daddy’s old words make sense.His office was small and cramped, a good fit for him, less-so for me. Stupid heels. The radio was tuned to local news.“…reports indicate that Landis, recently escaped from the Braiwood Institute for the Criminally Insane after killing two guards with an ax, may be on the road to Sacramento. He is to be considered-”Harold dove for the dial, “You don’t want to be listening to that. Scary sh-stuff.”The Chordettes singing about how they’d wish Mr. Sandman would bring them a dream must have been less scary for him.“That fine?” he asked.“Of course!” I said.“Because I can change it if you’d-”“It’s fine,” I said, touching his wrist. He breathed a sigh of relief, wiping his sweat-slicked forehead with his cap.“Okay. Good. Okay,” he said, plopping down in his chair.If he didn’t look so sad, it might have been funny. Even still, he did seem a little funny. If I wanted to give him a heart attack just now, I’d have asked him for the Coke he seemed to have forgotten about.“Are you all right?” I asked.He didn’t seem to hear me at first, so I asked again. Startled, he said, “All right? Yes, of course, why wouldn’t I be! I mean, that maniac from Braiwood’s got us all scared some, and you got those stories of those cops findin’ that commie nest over in Milton’s Mill, and you know how this town can be sometimes.”I did. Probably better than most. There was nothing that could really be done about what made Prospero Prospero (or the commies in Milton’s Mill if they were even real), but at least that maniac sounded like something that could be fixed.“Well, the police will catch him, I think,” I said. “That is their job after all.”“Of course. Of course. It’s just… do you really think that you oughta be hitting the road tonight? Maybe consider waiting for the morning when it’ll be safer for a wo- what I mean to be sayin’ is that when it’ll be safer for someone like you…”I tried to be proper, I tried to be nice, but after something like that, I couldn’t hold back.“You do know who I am, right?” I asked him.All the color of his face seemed to drain into his belly, “Yes, I mean, oh God, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend. Please, please don’t tell-”His contrition was enough. “I won’t tell my daddy, you’re fine.”That didn’t help him any. Quickly, I added, “Or anyone else.”That was enough to set him at ease, “Thank you, I mean, you understand here how my business is my life. Without this my family, I got kids you know, and…”“You’re fine,” I said. “While I must admit that your service could use a little work, you’re as kind and enthusiastic as ever. I’ll make sure to tell people about your kindness, and that I have no doubt that one day you’ll find yourself the King of Cars in Prospero.”I probably could have come up with an even dumber title than the King of Cars if I really wanted to try, but I didn’t. I just wanted to get out. I had to get out. I didn’t particularly want to hurt his feelings on my way. He was a toadie, sure, but he was a good man, and like he said, he had kids. He did right by them as best he could, and was as good a citizen as you were bound to find in Prospero (god knew that if any commies ever found their way into town, Harold Brundle would be the first to find them).If he played the game right, I had no doubt he’d go far in Prospero.Harold led me outside when Frank waved. He gassed up the car, checked the fluids and gave the car a quick rub down with a rag, making it look as good as new. Frank looked oddly at my luggage in the back seat, spitting more tobacco into his bottle.“Looks fine, looks mighty fine,” Harold said. “Except you left one of the back doors open you god- you retard!”Harold strode over and slammed the door shut.“Good as new!” he said, wiping his hands on his shirt.“Thanks,” I said, reaching for my purse. “Now, what do I owe you?”Harold shook his head, “It’s on the house. Just remember what to tell folks!”“I will,” I said, getting into the driver’s seat and starting the engine. It purred to life beautifully.“And God bless!” I called out as I drove off. The cool evening air was even cooler with the car moving. For a moment I thought about pulling over to put the top up, but it was such a beautiful night, why shouldn’t I enjoy the fresh air? It wasn’t going to last forever, after all.The world became inky black maybe only a hundred feet past Brundle’s Gas & Go, my car’s headlights only showing a faint sliver of the road in front of me. It would be like this most of the way to Sacramento. There I’d find a motel for the night, and then…And then my life would really begin.My real life.Prospero was a prison. It didn’t look like one, it didn’t act like one. Everybody smiled, everybody was friendly, everybody waved the flag on all the right holidays… but for me it was a prison. Maybe for all of us and I was just the only one who knew better.Everybody was so trapped in their routines, so stuck with trying to be what everybody else expected that they didn’t dream of being anything more. I did dream, though. I dreamt because I could. I knew how bad things could be when you didn’t do anything to rock the boat…And so I left.I could make Sacramento before midnight. San Francisco by the end of the day tomorrow. Turn south after that, and then…Hollywood.I was going to be a star. I was going to be a star.I’d heard the stories, I knew of all the girls who went down there only to find it the end of the road, never getting further than the front door (or couch) of some studio head, spending everything they have on getting there and never able to leave, whiling away their years as waitresses or maids.I wasn’t going to be like them. There were people down there, people I knew from back Home who would help me get on my feet. People who would open doors that my legs wouldn’t have to, not that they couldn’t. I was a dish. No Marilyn, because she was one of a kind, but pretty close. Good body, not too thin, chestnut hair with just the right amount of bounce, and a face that you could easily see on a film poster. I was going to be a star.No, better than a star. I would be a legend.Wouldn’t daddy just love that?I adjusted the rear-view mirror, trying to get a look at that star-making face when I saw it.I wasn’t alone on the dark, twisting forest road.There was a pair of headlights behind me, catching up fast. For reasons I wasn’t entirely sure of, they made me nervous. Come on, this road is public. It could be anyone.At first they were just a couple dots in the distance. Now they were saucers, glowing bright and catching up, now maybe only fifty feet away. Forty.They’ll just pass on by, then you-The lights flashed once. Twice.Just step on the gas. Get out of here.The highway was tight and winding and stepping on the gas was dangerous, but I did it, trying to increase the distance between us.It didn’t work. He closed in further, flashing those lights again and laying on the horn.I wasn’t scared, not really, not quite yet, but was pretty close to getting there.The first time he rammed me, then I was scared.My car was nice and sturdy, but I was nothing compared to him. His was a truck, wide and heavy. He could run right through me if he wanted to.He rammed me again, trying to force me off the road as he honked and flashed his lights.The next impact made me scream and nearly took me off the road. I stepped on the gas even harder, but he matched me, pulling alongside me in the opposite lane.I knew the truck. Knew the driver.Frank Templeton, in the Brundle’s Gas & Go tow truck.He swerved away from me slightly, ready to try to slam into my side.I don’t know how or why I did what I did, maybe I saw it in one of those gangster movies Johnny always loved to watch, but it worked.Right as he tried to swerve in to me, I braked suddenly, veering to the left and smashing my fender into his right rear wheel.The truck spun around in front of me, tipping onto its side and rolling violently into a ditch. Part of me, an old part, thought I should at least stop and take a look, just make sure he was okay.Thankfully that old part wasn’t really loud.I drove into the night, watching those glowing headlights disappear in my rearview mirror as I laughed and shrieked.No matter how hard it tried, Prospero wouldn’t hold on to me. I was going to get out. I was going to escape.I was going to be a legend.I turned on the radio with a shaking hand, found some music. Some doo-wop band was singing about how great it would be if life could be a dream. It was cheery, but not quite what I was looking for after what just happened. I reached to change the station.“Don’t touch that dial. I like that song.”The voice was thick and raspy, like someone who’d lived their life breathing barbed wire.Even worse, it was in the seat behind me.He was fast and strong, knocking the bags he’d hidden under aside, some of them falling into the road.One of his arms was around my throat, the other pressed the broken top of an ax into my cheek.“You know this road?” he hissed.“Yes, some,” I choked out.“Good. Find a nice, quiet place to pull over,” he said.I knew what he meant to do, but knew better than to fight him. There was a soft shoulder up ahead that led to a thin patch of trees, and I pulled off into it.“Good girl, good girl,” he said, releasing his hand from my throat. I took in several deep, hacking breaths now that I could breathe free again. He pressed the ax more heavily into my cheek. Its blade pierced my skin, drawing a thin line of blood.“That guy back there. In the truck. He who honks his horn too much. You did a good job to him. But I gotta wonder, what do you think he was trying to do?” he said, pushing the ax even harder into my cheek, drawing more blood.“I don’t know,” I said.“Guess,” he said.“I don’t know,” I sobbed, hoping that was what he wanted as his free hand found its way into my blouse.“GUESS!” he roared.I don’t think he expected me to smile.“I think he was trying to warn you, Landis,” I said.“What?” he said, dumbfounded.He didn’t see the attack coming. I made sure of it. My blood drops on the ax head leapt into his eyes, trying to burrow in and making him scream.It was a good sound.I changed my body, sounding like breaking wood as I snapped my ribs open into a gaping mouth of many teeth and tongues. The tongues drew his searching hand in, and the teeth made sure it wasn’t attached to his arm anymore.He screamed even louder, pulling the stump where his right hand once was and trying to cradle it against his near-blind face. I didn’t stop changing there, no, he deserved a good change for what he’d done, what he meant to do. Tentacles ending with hooks burst from my shoulders, back and neck and wrapped around him tight. New eyes opened at the back of my head to better see him, and a large, toothy mouth on the end of a proboscis burst from my midback and hovered in front of him.“Oh god, oh please, someone HELP! PLEASE SOMEONE HELP!” he screamed, his cries reaching no one in the middle of this dark, forest road.“Please, I didn’t mean, just, I, what are you? Just what the hell are you?” he sobbed.All my mouths smiled just then as my arms bent backwards, popping with that wood crack sound, fingers stretching and growing with claws as they wrapped around his head.“What am I?” I asked mockingly. “I’m a legend!”I made sure his screams echoed long and loud through the night. I may have had too much fun, may have messed my car a lot more than I meant to, but it was fun seeing what this new body I’d been given was capable of.It didn’t look like I’d make it to Sacramento by midnight after all, but as I buried the last bits of him beneath a heavy drift of pine needles, I found myself thankful for the first time in this life that I was from Prospero.

There's something rotten beneath the small town of Prospero, California. For over a century, the town's history has been rich with tales of monsters, miracles and mysterious disappearances in the surrounding woods. It’s a town where everybody has something to hide, especially those who may not be entirely human.

Sixteen-year-old Mina Todd knows about the otherworldly shapeshifters that secretly run Prospero and has dedicated her life to fighting them. Ben Pastor, in town to attend the funeral of his missing childhood friend, Haley Perkins, has never believed any of the strange stories about what happens in Prospero. When Haley turns up alive and well at her own memorial service, Ben and Mina are forced to work together to uncover what happened to her. Though they may not always understand each other, Ben and Mina’s unlikely friendship may very well be the only thing that can save the town, and possibly the world, from its insidious invaders.

Author

Matt Carter is an author of Horror, Sci-Fi, and yes even a little bit of Young Adult fiction. Along with his wife, F.J.R. Titchenell, he is represented by Fran Black of Literary Counsel and lives in the usually sunny town of San Gabriel, CA.